


For Roads Untraveled

by LilyC



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilyC/pseuds/LilyC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eduardo has done a amazing job of moving all the way to the other side of the world and avoiding Mark in all but the most inevitable situations. He's had a very strict protocol of blank-faced business talk and empty pleasantries for those inevitable ones, too, one that requires careful mental preparation and a considerable amount of alcohol. Mark really should keep his part of the deal and stay in his half of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Roads Untraveled

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Steph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steph/gifts).



> For Steph. Happy Yuletide! I hope you enjoy it. :D 
> 
> Thanks [ChristyCorr](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ChristyCorr) for beta and poking. <3

It all starts when Eduardo is waiting for a table and a date at the bar of a Singapore restaurant. He is idly watching a table full of chatting kids that can't possible be older than 18 and are way underdressed for the place, wondering if maybe they're local celebrities to be getting away with it—then Mark, of all people, emerges from the bathroom to join them. The kids at the table all quieten and stare in awe as Mark starts to talk, as if each word is pure genius and not the usual mix of rude remarks and half-assed explanations Eduardo could bet is actually spilling from Mark’s mouth. Their food lies abandoned on the table while Mark stares at his phone and the other guests stare at Mark.

Up until now, Eduardo has done a amazing job of moving all the way to the other side of the world and avoiding Mark in all but the most inevitable situations. He's had a very strict protocol of blank-faced business talk and empty pleasantries for those inevitable ones, too, one that requires careful mental preparation and a considerable amount of alcohol. He is not prepared for this today, for sitting across the restaurant on a date with Mark across the room. Mark really should keep his part of the deal and stay in his half of the world. 

Eduardo has almost decided to just slip away quietly and text his date to have him meet somewhere else when Mark looks up from his phone directly at him. Eduardo watches Mark’s body go tense for a moment before he composes himself, adopting the usual blank mask. Mark gives him a slow nod, making it impossible for Eduardo to escape without looking like he cares. 

He gets up and walks to Mark’s table, bracing for all the hurt and anger that are sure to hit at any moment now, the old feelings of jealousy and missed opportunities. Mark looks up at him with a serious expression. The kids on the table are watching them in avid silence. Eduardo isn't sure whether they've recognized him or are just reacting to the suddenly tense atmosphere. Mark looks tired, like he could use some of the food they are all so stubbornly ignoring. And Eduardo is, surprisingly, not fighting the urge to punch anyone in the face this time.

“Mark, how have you being?” he says, trying to keep a neutral tone.

“Fine. Long time, Wardo.”

Mark sounds as tired as he looks, and Eduardo bites his lips to swallow back any reaction to the nickname – but even that doesn’t that doesn’t bring up any anger, just a rush of inexplicable fondness. 

He takes a step back, all of a sudden needing to leave Mark’s presence as fast as possible, before he finds himself suggesting that Mark _eat something_.

“Yeah, it has. If you'll all excuse me, I was just leaving.” 

“You were at the bar, you haven't even had dinner yet,” Mark counters, putting his phone down and focusing all his attention in Eduardo in a very disconcerting, and more than a little alarming, way. Eduardo really, really needs to get out of here.

“Goodnight, Mark,” Eduardo says and turns around, walking out the door in the most dignified way he can muster, trying not to make it too obvious that he's running away.

Eduardo goes home and sits in his kitchen, eating dry cereal straight out of the box while his phone beeps with increasingly angry texts from his stood-up date. He forgot to text the guy in his hurry to get away from Mark, and right now he can't even bring himself to care. 

He lets his head fall against the tabletop and just stay there. This is what Mark does to him. Mark makes him stand perfectly nice people up at great restaurants and run home to sulk in the dark, eating possibly-expired faux-American cereal.

Mark is bad. A bad person, and bad for him in particular. And even so, Eduardo can’t summon up the the proper rush of anger and hurt today. He just wants to go back there and make sure the jerk gets some sleep and actually eats something. Eduardo starts laughing, picturing what Mark would have to say about him having an existential crisis over not feeling _angry enough_. Eduardo gives up, gets up and goes to bed. No reason to sit in his cold kitchen and torture himself when he can do it just as well in bed. 

The next time Eduardo sees Mark, they’re at a conference in New York. He knows Mark will be there – he had made his assistant check, twice. In the past, that would have meant Eduardo would be staying the hell away, but he has a point to prove to himself now. So he flies to New York; he's prepared himself for it, locking himself in his office and reading over all the old emails from the deposition and the lawsuit; his assistant has been giving him increasingly worried looks for the past several days. Poor girl deserves a raise. He has managed to convince himself that the restaurant was a fluke, probably caused by the surprise, and it won’t happen again.

Everything goes mostly according to plan on the first day. Eduardo may not have been able to summon up the appropriate anger yet, but he is doing a good enough job of managing indifference. He hasn’t had to suppress any ill-advised urges to feed Mark or anything. He's totally rocking this resentment thing.

His conclusions start to get tested after the second day. Most people that attended the panels migrate down to the hotel bar after the last seminar and are now working on get spectacularly shitfaced and pretending they don’t wish half the room dead. Eduardo is sitting alone and working on his third whisky and some fries when a group takes the table behind him. He can tell Mark is with them without so much as glancing back, the voice easy to pick out even in the crowded bar. Eduardo hunches down in his seat, relying on the high booths to hide him. He's still able to listen in to Mark’s conversation despite the din if he stays very still and chew very slowly. Not that he's trying or anything.

Mark and his friends are discussing the last speaker of the day, doing what sounds like a very drunk, very messy pros-and-cons list of his ideas, heavy on the cons. Eduardo himself had a hard time during that panel, torn between boredom and rage as the guy went from a pile of utterly wrong assumptions to a set of extremely outdated or even more wrong conclusions. He can't stop himself from smiling as he listens to Mark trashing each of the hypotheses in his snarkiest deadpan tone, wrapping with a five-point summary of just how much of an idiot the guy is, and a note that he probably only got the speaker position because his father is a US Senator.

Eduardo realizes with a pang that he's missed this. He's genuinely missed Mark trash-talking people that could make his life impossibly hard without a second thought. Eduardo's head is spinning, all the carefully-maintained indifference from the last two days slipping away as he listens to Mark being a complete asshole and _misses it_. He wishes he could get up and join his table, offer his input, poke holes at Mark's arguments just to keep him going, to see his smirk when he's done proving he's the smartest person in the room.

Mark excuses himself to use the bathroom and on an impulse, Eduardo gets up, too. He stares at Mark's departing back and tries to get his thoughts in any kind of order, to shake off the urge desire to go to him. The task proves harder than expected through the whisky haze, so he follows Mark, helpless. Mark is washing his hands when he gets there. 

“Hey, Wardo,” Mark says with tipsy smile. He is watching Eduardo's reflection in the mirror. The old nickname seems comfortable on his tongue still, like nothing has happened between them. Eduardo's blood boils.

“You have to stop doing that!”

“What? Doing what?” 

Mark looks genuinely confused, and Eduardo has had enough of this nonsense. He shoves Mark against the wall, pinning him in place and kissing him. Mark lets out a low whine and grabs Eduardo’s shoulder, pulling him closer and kissing back. Eduardo suddenly freezes, realizing what he is doing for the first time since he got up from the table. The comfortable hazy warmth of whisky flees his brain at once. 

He takes a step back, pushing Mark away and just staring. Mark is watching him with huge eyes, mouth open,breathing hard, still slumped against the wall. Eduardo can’t deal with that, with any of it. He turns around and leaves the bathroom, not even pretending he is not running away this time.

Eduardo is not even back to his hotel when the texts starts to arrive—mildly impressive, considering that Mark isn't even supposed to have this number. The first is, “what was that,” followed by, “where are you?” then, “answer me,” and finally, “never mind, I will hack every NY hotels register”. Eduardo looks at his phone for fa too long, trying to compose an adult and reasonable answer to any of those before just telling the the driver to turn around and take him to JFK instead.  
When he touches downs in Florida, his phone immediately blows up with even more messages that he resolutely doesn’t look at while en route to his parents' house, or after he gets there. His father isn't home and his mother is definitely not impressed by the surprise visit or his lack of luggage; she becomes even less impressed when he lets escape he simply left it all behind in a New York hotel. In hindsight, he should have thought this one through a little longer, he ponders, while changing into a set of his dad’s pyjamas.

Eduardo shuffles around the house for two days, avoiding his mother’s questions and ostensibly pretending he came to pack and move the very few things he still has at his parents' while his mother glares disapprovingly and his father carefully doesn’t get involved. His phone has been blissfully quiet since it ran out of power.

Eduardo opens the door on the third day of totally-not-hiding-from-Mark and find Mark standing outside. Wearing a tie and holding flowers. With a perfectly douchebaggy smile plastered on his face, like any of this makes _any sense whatsoever_. Eduardo is wearing basketball shorts that stopped fitting him properly ten years ago and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt he got in Disneyland at 14. He looks at Mark trying to figure out whether he's some kind of weird dream or a hallucination.

“What the hell?”

“Flowers for you mother,” Mark answers, completely missing the point.

“You've never bought flowers in your life, Mark. And that's not what I meant— what the hell are you doing at my parents’ front door?”

“Picking you up. We have a date, I texted you about it.”

“I left my charger in New York. I’m not going out with you, Mark, are you out of your mind?”

“It's okay, I don’t mind waiting for you to get changed.”

Eduardo slams the door closed and goes back upstairs. He briefly considers going back to Singapore this time – or finding somewhere beyond the reach of internet, that could work too. The internet cables don't reach Antarctica, he's heard. Might be a bit cold, though. Maybe he should just get a charger, check his phone and end this whole mess once for all. 

Decisions, decisions. He decides to take a nap instead—a long one. 

When he comes back downstairs his mother goes off on a long-winded speech about proper etiquette and how one doesn't leave people sitting outside like stray dogs. Mark’s flowers proudly in display on the dining table.  
“Mom, that was Mark,” he pleads with her in the small hope she will just drop the subject already.

“I know, darling.”

“Mark Zuckerberg, Mom. I sued him, for God’s sake! I won’t invite him for _dinner._ ”

“Looks like he was the one trying to invite you for dinner. He brought, flowers Eduardo!”

“He is an asshole, Mom,” Eduardo whines, in a tone worthy of his fifteen-year-old bratty self. Mom's superpowers never fail.

“I know, darling. He really is, but are you sure you really mind?”

Eduardo opens and closes his mouth, searching for a answer that is not a complete lie while his mother stares placidly at him with an all-knowing smirk. 

He sighs.

“I… I need to borrow your phone charger.” 

“Sure, darling.” 

She gives his cheek a kiss, smirk still in place, before going to fetch the charger. Eduardo sometimes hates his family.

When Eduardo finally turns his phone back on, there are a couple of calls from his hotel in New York, a politely-worded text from his assistant questioning if he has died and whether she should start looking for a new job, and 36 texts from Mark. 

Most of the texts are from the night he left New York, demanding to know, in increasingly rude terms, where he was and what he'd been thinking back at the bar. Except for the last four—those are spaced out through the days he's been hiding in Miami: “Dustin says you were always in love with me,” says the first, then, “was I supposed to know that?” and, “Can we go on a date now?”

Finally, there is one text from after Mark showed up at his door: “please talk to me.”

Eduardo had to come to terms with two things after the deposition. First, he was terribly wrong about Facebook, and fucking Sean Park was right. Second, Mark didn’t really care about him, not the way Eduardo cared, and what they had had never been more than friendship. He accepted these and tried to move on. It wasn’t very nice of Mark to just barge in and screw with his worldview again.

He doesn’t know how to react to any of it. He starts typing an answer for Mark, then deletes it and starts over again and again, until he gives up on trying. He puts his phone away and goes back to pack all the bits of stuff left at his parents that he has never actually intended to take anywhere.

He hides in the attic and starts going through old boxes of Harvard stuff, surfacing only for meals and sleep. His mother hovers a lot, telling to stop sulking and complaining, loudly and in two different languages, about “stupid, immature, dramatic boys,” while Eduardo ignores her and makes half-assed excuses.

Eduardo is coming back to his room from another trip to the attic, arms full of old newspapers – there's probably one with the chicken article somewhere – to find his dad sitting at the desk. It has been a week since New York and he had managed to stay out of the mess until now. His father looks up from what Eduardo is pretty sure is an old college notebook covered in weather predictions with a pained expression in his face.

“Son, we really need to talk.” 

“Not you too, dad. He screwed me over. I sued him. Shouldn’t that be the end of it?”

“Yes, he did; and yes, you did. And if this were about business, that would indeed be the end of it, all settled and done. But it clearly isn’t, as your behavior this week has shown.”

His dad looks at him for a long moment, as if weighing the benefits of continuing to try.

“Life is not that clear-cut, Eduardo; things are messy and complex, and people make mistakes. You could just forget all that, ignore whatever happened that's caused all this to surface and made you act this way, and go back to your life. But if that was what you really wanted, you would be back in Singapore by now, wouldn't you?”

His father gets up and passes him his phone.

“You don’t need to forgive him and this doesn’t need to go anywhere if you don’t want it to, but if you want to give him a chance, and it seems that you do – just talk to him, listen to what he has to say.”

Eduardo sits on his bed, alone again, and stare at Mark's text. He types an answer for what feels like the hundredth time, but hits sending this time. “Okay, asshole," he sends before he can overthink things even more. "Pick me up at 8 pm for dinner, don’t be late”.

(Mark is late, as it turns out, and shows up like he hasn't slept or changed his clothes in three days. Eduardo goes out with him anyway.)


End file.
